Oracle database development started in 1977, and its code was rewritten from assembly to C in 1983. It became one of the most popular databases in the world.

In 1985 Windows 1.0 was released. Although Windows source code is not publicly available, it’s been stated that its kernel is mostly written in C, with some parts in assembly. Linux kernel development started in 1991, and it is also written in C. The next year, it was released under the GNU license and was used as part of the GNU Operating System. The GNU operating system itself was started using C and Lisp programming languages, so many of its components are written in C.

But C programming isn’t limited to projects that started decades ago, when there weren’t as many programming languages as today. Many C projects are still started today; there are some good reasons for that. Continue reading →

Knowing your user’s location is useful information in many applications we develop and use today. There are a lot of popular location-based applications out there that are making our lives easier, as well as changing the way that we use these services. An example is the wildly popular application Foursquare, where users who frequent to an establishment and “check in” often win discounts. Uber, which helps you get a ride from your mobile phone at a lower rate than a normal taxi. The list is large and still growing.

With the advent of tools like Docker, Linux Containers, and others, it has become super easy to isolate Linux processes into their own little system environments. This makes it possible to run a whole range of applications on a single real Linux machine and ensure no two of them can interfere with each other, without having to resort to using virtual machines. These tools have been a huge boon to PaaS providers. But what exactly happens under the hood?

These tools rely on a number of features and components of the Linux kernel. Some of these features were introduced fairly recently, while others still require you to patch the kernel itself. But one of the key components, using Linux namespaces, has been a feature of Linux since version 2.6.24 was released in 2008.

Anyone familiar with chroot already has a basic idea of what Linux namespaces can do and how to use namespace generally. Just as chroot allows processes to see any arbitrary directory as the root of the system (independent of the rest of the processes), Linux namespaces allow other aspects of the operating system to be independently modified as well. This includes the process tree, networking interfaces, mount points, inter-process communication resources and more. Continue reading →